


Touchdown

by Todesengel



Category: Voltron: Lion Voltron
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-09-25
Updated: 2005-09-25
Packaged: 2017-10-22 17:10:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/240430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Todesengel/pseuds/Todesengel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So many things have changed. So many things have stayed the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Touchdown

It was 1043 hours, local time, when Keith stumbled out onto the hot asphalt of the landing site and was manhandled into jeep by a couple of kids who'd stopped talking after Keith growled out some threat -- possibly against their families, or maybe slow and painful torture, something involving electricity and dials, he wasn't sure -- and just drove him to the impersonal little room of gray and off-green where he made his report, swaying as he stood, before heading to one of the bland rooms that housed all temporary personnel posted to the base. It was 1043 hours and the sun was shining and the birds were doing their damndest to make Keith wish he could kill them all just to stop their incessant chirping and damn the fucking ecological consequences to the deepest nether hell, because no matter how nice the day was or how good actual air tasted, his body kept screaming at him that it was the middle of third watch and he'd been up for nearly a week getting the skeleton of his crew home, and why wasn't he asleep and in bed like he should be? He was space-lagged to the edge of the spiral's arm and back, and he probably got himself another little black mark in his record for being too brusque and surly when he'd been debriefed, but he no longer cared about such trivial things. All he cared about was that the bed wasn't moving and the sheets were made out of honest-to-god natural fibers and that was enough for him to collapse without doing anything more than the bare necessities of habit.

He closed his eyes, surrendered himself to sleep and then some bastard shouted, right into his ear, "I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"

Keith didn't bother with the niceties of opening his eyes or swearing or doing anything except taking the nine-mil he always wore and shoving the business end into the soft underside of the bastard's jaw.

"Give me one reason why I shouldn't blow your head off right now," he growled, eyes still closed.

"Because killing your subordinates generates far too much paperwork. Besides, gun's empty." Something hard and rectangular landed on his belly and Keith opened one eye just enough to make out the blurred figure of Lance grinning at him, and then he shifted his attention down to the nine-mil's clip that lay on his stomach.

"I can still kill you, you know." It was mostly a face saving statement, and even as he said it Keith rolled over and buried his face into the pillows, pulled the blankets up a little closer. He rolled back over and pulled the clip out from underneath him, and that had to be a sign that he was starting to hit some sufficient level of 'rested' because he didn't think he'd have minded the clip digging into his stomach when he first hit the bed.

"Yeah, yeah." The bed made a rather unpleasant rocking motion when Lance sat down -- not quite like the shuddering of weapon fire scorching a hull, but not entirely dissimilar either, and it made Keith go into high-alert mode, muscles that were finally beginning to relax tightening up again until he felt like he was thrumming.

Lance yanked the blankets off of him and grabbed him by the hand, pulling him forward, and Keith decided that Lance had been planetside for far too long if he'd forgotten how to read all of the danger vibes.

And maybe he'd been floating around on the edge for too long if he was seriously considering breaking some of Lance's bones -- felt his hand twitching in that direction before he managed to remind his body that this was a friendly, despite all evidence to the contrary.

It was bad to kill friendlies. Looked terrible on your record and got you a week long vacation under the steely gaze of the head-docs and six weeks of 'light' duty.

"Go away," Keith said, instead of the thousand of other things he could have, and pulled free of Lance's grasp. He sank back down and pulled the pillow over his head, keeping a death grip on it just in case Lance decided that this, too, was something that needed to be removed.

"Not going to happen. You're coming home with me." Lance sniffed, in a somewhat offended manner. "I can't believe you'd rather stay here than at my place." He poked Keith in the side, hit the spots that used to be ticklish before life had dulled them.

"It's quiet here." Keith opened his eyes and glared at Lance, just a little, and damn it his brain was starting to fire, which meant he'd never get to sleep now.

"Listen, pal o' mine, you're coming with me even if I have to get a couple of burly cadets to haul your ass out of here."

"They'll never do it. I out rank you." Keith yawned, and he knew -- he _knew_ that he'd already lost the battle and was going to be heading home with Lance, because, really, he'd missed this kind of contact. He'd missed the ease of the familiar, the peculiar bond that they'd some how been saddled with, even through the uncomfortable times right after they'd ended and still couldn't stand to be apart.

Not that he'd ever admit that to Lance, of course.

"Anyway, I'm scarier than you, hands down." He waved a hand in front of his face, mostly to indicate the dark circles beneath his eyes, the fading bruise on his cheek, the new scar that cut through his eyebrow and made his left eyelid droop just a little. "Plus, I've got that whole post-combat stress thing going on. You know, crazy killer and all. You've lost your edge with all that academic crap you've been doing."

"Maybe. But I can fail them." Lance prodded him again. "Come on, Keith. Let's go home."

*

There were, Keith was coming to realize, quite a number of changes that had occurred in the three and a bit years that he'd been gone.

Oh he knew that nothing stayed the same. He was living proof of that, the man he'd been when he'd left more or less unrecognizable to the man he was now, and he'd been there for every one of those small -- and not so small -- changes. Harder, meaner, and certainly less optimistic than he had been when he'd jumped on board his sweet little ship and hauled ass because he didn't want to cope with the life that had loomed so threateningly before him.

Easier to be a hero when he was gone.

Easier to not let anybody down if there was nobody around to watch his mask crack.

Easier to pretend that Lance had chosen the academic life, instead of having it thrust upon him because of a blinding flash and an act of gross stupidity and a slow, lingering sickness that left his lungs too weak for high-G work.

He really was a coward, and he probably should have stuck around, but he hadn't been able to face all those expectations, to live up to the image that just keeping his team alive had created in the minds of the world. He should have stayed, and if he had maybe then he would have still been able to call Lance his. At the very least, he would have been able to recognize the stranger Lance had become who woke him up every morning in a variety of very inventive ways that seemed specifically designed to torture him.

Today it was a cup of coffee waved underneath his nose at some unholy hour.

"Up! Up! Time to get up! It's five-twenty and it's going to be beautiful today." Lance slid his hand underneath Keith's body, probably in an attempt to flip him over, and the three bracelets he wore -- the ones made of some sort of thick fiber, hemp maybe or possibly hair -- were rough against Keith's belly and that was new. His Lance had hated wearing things on his wrists -- hated having anything on his wrists, even hands -- because they felt like shackles, he said.

Keith muttered something very rude in Hebronian and flailed blindly for the cup because if he was going to be up at 0520 on his downtime he was damn sure going to be doing it fully caffeinated. "Coffee," he slurred out, his mouth not quite working right. "Gimme."

"Nope, this one's mine. If you want some you have to come downstairs." Lance took a mouthful and made noises that bordered on the lewd, and Keith pried his eyes open a little bit more.

"Evil," he muttered

"Yup." Lance moved away and he took the coffee with him. He leaned against the door and Keith could barely see the gray that was beginning to creep in at his temples, although that may have been a function of his failing eyes.

He took in the sight, the planes of Lance's body, which had become leaner and harder in the months that had passed between them, his skin burned golden by the sun. He'd chopped his hair short and grown what might have been a five-o-clock shadow a day and a half ago, and that at least was familiar in its general scruffiness. The slow, aching arousal that bloomed deep within his belly was familiar too, and Keith shifted until his erection wasn't quite as prominent.

"So, give." Keith rubbed his eyes then flung an arm over them, peered at Lance from out of the shadow. "Why're we up so damn early?"

"Groundswell," Lance said. He took another mouthful of coffee and grinned like a shark. "We're going surfing."

The door closed behind him with a dull thud and it took Keith a long moment before he caught up with his ears.

"Wait. What?"

*

Whoever said being in space was like being in water was a damn fool, Keith decided about the seventh time he capsized and he swallowed another half-gallon of seawater. Space was...

Space was empty.

As Keith had learned all too well in this torture Lance inflicted upon him, water wasn't. Water lived, and not just because there were things living in it. There was weight to water, thickness, movement, definition. There were directions, top and bottom, left and right. There was gravity, even in water that didn't sway and dance with the moon, and how could anybody think that water was at all like space? How could anybody compare this living, breathing, floating ecocosm to space, which was dead and empty and void and black, where there was no up or down, no compass on which to orient your mind, just the vastness of nothing, and the harshness of purified air, and the heavy panting as that air ran down breath by breath until there was nothing left but poison and sleep.

There was no way to ride space, to use its harshness, to synchronize with it; there was only force and forcing and that was nothing at all like water either.

Keith sat back on his board -- which was what had dumped him into the drink the first five times until he found the knack of it -- and let his feet feel the pull of the ocean and his skin feel the warmth of the sun and forced space out of his head and back up into the sky where it belonged.

It was actually rather calming to be sitting here, smelling like sunscreen and salt, rocked by Mother Ocean. Of course, he had to keep an eye on what Lance had so charmingly dubbed Paradise Point, where the reef nearly scraped the bottom of his board and an entire community of sea urchins was just waiting to make his acquaintance, but otherwise it was all rather pleasant. Soothing.

And the view was spectacular, Lance's grin almost blinding as the sun on the waters as he flew past, shouting wildly, doing tricks.

Keith didn't think he'd ever seen Lance quite so happy, and that hurt, a little. Enough to cast a shadow on the sunshine and make him feel old and tired.

"Keith?" Lance called to him as he paddled past, voice nearly lost in the sound of the waves trying to invade his brain via his ears.

"Little too early for this much energy," he called back, and when he hit the shore he let himself sink into the sand, slowly, like it was a warm bath. He could hear the silence of people trying very hard not to stare at the purple-white scars that traversed his body -- the small, puckered wound in his shoulder where a very painful beam of energy had neatly gone right through him; the bigger, messier scattering of craters where he'd taken a belly of buckshot; the neat line left by the stitches that'd held him together after his people extracted the alien whatever-it-was that had started to burrow down and grow like a cancer; the jagged edges of where he'd performed a similar procedure on himself, ripped out the poisoned barbs that had killed Cary and Keegan and sliced open the swelling flesh in a completely illogical attempt to halt the poison from doing the same to him; and a hundred, a thousand, a lifetime more of them, hidden behind newer scars or embedded in his soul where only he could see them.

He used to believe the old spiel about every scar telling a story, because once upon a time it had for him. And then he'd accumulated far too many until he couldn't remember if that particular mark across the back of his left hand was from the time he'd accidentally burned himself when cooking or if it was from the white-hot rod of steel some faceless bastard had used to beat him for breathing and possessing technology that rivaled his own. He used to believe a lot of things, and he used to be a better man. But all things change.

"Keith! Watch this!" Lance's shout was familiar and Keith propped himself up just in time to see Lance crash and burn in a most spectacular fashion. Worry made him tense his body, sit on the edge of rising, and then Lance resurfaced, and his laughter was loud even from the shore.

It made Keith smile, and wonder if perhaps some things stayed the same.

*

Predictably, Lance waited until Keith had a mouthful of the dark, bitter, thick coffee -- almost a sludge, the beans burned and the entire brew left to boil down, concentrate until it tasted like a poison -- that he'd come to rely on like air before he said anything, soft and gentle-like and very carefully not looking at Keith. Keith had known that the question was coming for a while, since Lance had gotten two burly youngsters -- who apparently owed Lance their entire career and possibly the trust-fund earmarked for their first born's education -- to carry him and his possessions out to Lance's beat up old jeep and dump him in the back with a great deal less ceremony than a highly decorated officer who knew five different ways to kill a man using only a paperclip deserved.

He'd known that the question was going to be asked tonight, because there was absolutely nothing in the world that was at all fascinating enough about Lance's fingernails to warrant the attention he was given them.

"Want to tell me what happened?"

And there it was, out there, spoken, real, and Keith had been dreading it, because, really, he didn't know what happened for all that he'd been right there happening along with it. All he knew was that they'd still been fucking up until the day Lance cold-cocked him and took a turn at being a hero and was denied everything that ever meant anything to him. And maybe the would have kept on going, even after, except that Keith had always had a problem with guilt.

And shame.

And, if he was going to be honest with himself, commitment to anything except the military, which wasn't really committing to anything at all.

Plus, he'd been angry at just about everything, irrational though that anger had been, and afraid of being alive and being lauded as a hero when Lance had been lying in a hospital bed and hooked up to tubes and machines, and so obviously, painfully, desperately uncomfortable in Keith's presence.

That, really, was what had pushed Keith away into space, because even when they'd screamed themselves hoarse at each other and Keith seriously thought about killing Lance and throwing the body into the volcano, he'd always imagined jumping in after him, because he _needed_ Lance. Needed him like he now needed coffee and Lance needed the ocean. Needed him like blood, and he'd been certain that Lance needed him the same way given all of the times they'd had hate-sex because he'd been horny and Lance had been angry and horny; been certain because Lance had told him so, and now Lance practically begged for him to go, and given who he was, Keith had gone.

A decision of monumental stupidity, he saw now, but that was the way it was with hindsight.

He'd probably still have gone, even knowing what he did now, even after spending three months trapped in a tiny cage in the middle of the Hebronian version of a prison camp. He'd still go, because Lance had asked him to go, and he was weak and certainly not strong enough to withstand the demons of his own mind.

"Must've hurt." The soft trace of Lance's finger along the scar that so neatly split his left eyebrow into unequal parts was entirely unexpected and Keith twitched, pulled back a little.

Lance took his hand away, which wasn't been entirely what Keith had been hoping for. He didn't know what he'd been hoping for.

"So. What happened?" Lance's voice was soft and Keith might have had to strain for it if Lance wasn't right there, so close, so intense, so alien in the many facets of his familiarity, like the way he bumped against Keith's knee and the way he kept his hands to himself, which he'd never used to do. They'd never had boundaries, and now they had... guidelines. Privacy hedges that weren't real impediments but just reminders that there were areas into which the other couldn't see, separations and lines drawn in the sand but no less real for the shifting nature of that particular medium.

Keith sank back into the couch.

"Torture. Pain. My arrogant morality finally meeting the unmovable object known as the Universe." He took a drink from his coffee. "Guess morality isn't the irresistible force that it used to be."

Lance nodded, because once upon a time, way back when, they'd both been in similar straits and that, really, was how their twisted co-dependency had formed.

Drule prison camps had funny ways of forging alliances.

"It was worse than _Herur-tor_ ," Keith said, because he saw Lance's expression and it had been. It had been much, much worse because _Herur-tor_ had been six months of extreme unpleasantness masquerading as true hell.

He'd seen hell around month fourteen, when they were almost lost, just on the edge of known space, the Hebronian mothership chunks of scrap floating around them. He'd been a real terror in those first few days back on his ship, ranting to his boys about what a bunch of fucking idiots they'd been, coming after him, risking their lives for him, and even now he didn't understand it. Couldn't understand it, except he'd always been able to inspire loyalty of a sort that would have made him a very dangerous man indeed if he'd ever been in the mood to take the conqueror's route.

More guilt over that fact, guilt compounded, squared, raised to the power of self-flagellation. If they hadn't been in the middle of nowhere, damaged first by the explosion and later by ships that couldn't rightly be classified as either friend or enemy but more like wounded animals backed into a corner, Keith probably would have pulled a runner like he always did. Did, in fact, contemplate doing so except he'd known by then that his crew would track him down, and he didn't have enough hours in the night to dream about every dead face who stared at him in shattered hope of salvation -- he'd never sleep if he had to dream about the faces of his entire crew, dead by his hands, causally if not directly.

"You're empty." Lance's voice was startling loud, and the hands that took his coffee cup just startling in their touch. Keith stared up at him, past and present and the maze-like nature of their relationship -- more layered and nested with hidden dangers and hidden surprises than even the Brass' doublespeak -- became conflated, then separated out into their proper positions.

The expression Lance wore was a new one, guarded and open at the same time. "More coffee?" he asked.

Keith shook his head.

They didn't speak of the mission again.

*

He surprised Lance three days later by being the first one up and leaving breakfast and a note on the table and all of his stuff in Lance's guest room just to reassure everybody that he wasn't taking off in the wee hours of the morning again. As the squat buildings of the base loomed before him, he seriously considered abandoning everything and hitching a ride out of this system to somewhere far, far away. But he wasn't the foolish man he'd been and he owed his team something, an apology for putting up with him at the very least.

He made his driver stop at the base's hospital and walked up and down the beds of the wounded men who were still being held, and he should have done this the first day he was conscious. Half of what was left of his crew had been hauled in here as soon as they'd reached synchronous orbit, and only a quarter of that number were left. Which made him breathe easier and feel sad at the same time because he hadn't been able to watch his boys walk out that door.

"Off to see the Brass, Skip?" Mulcahy asked him, even though he was wearing his dress blues and it should have been painfully obvious that he was heading toward a reckoning of some form or another, but Mulcahy always did have to state the obvious.

"Well, I put off my court martial long enough." Keith grinned at his men, a bit lopsided, and played with his cap. "Don't worry, boys. I'll recommend you all for a nice spot of desk duty."

The shouted threats that ushered him out the door was the music of angels to him, and it bolstered him when he stood before the Brass and tried to explain in as calm and measured a voice as he could how an eighteen-month scouting mission to seek out allies somehow became three years and cost the lives of fifty-two men, practically destroyed one extremely advanced piece of technology, and was a hands-down failure of epic proportions.

He was very proud of the fact that he didn't once say any of the things he wanted to the entire six days of the questioning. Even when the Brass stubbornly refused to believe that planets terrorized by both Doom destroyers and Drule _d'ztac_ were precisely the type of people to shoot first and listen to the 'peaceful explorers' spiel later. Much later, as the case sometimes was, and quite often after some serious torture or a body bag was rocketed up from the planet.

Keith was just glad that they believed him about the Hebronians, although _that_ had only happened after he'd showed off his new linguistic skills and called them things that were better left untranslated. He had to hand to the Hebronians -- evil, sadistic bastards though they may be, with their chambers and probes and fondness for acid, they did have the most creative ways of insulting people. And a hundred and twelve words for pain, which more or less summed them up as a species quite nicely in Keith's mind.

That the Hebronians weren't coming for them was a miracle straight from the hands of Sergeant McCleod and his knack with explosives.

He called Lance around 1400 hours on the last day of the inquiry, feeling dirtier than he'd ever felt after his boys pulled him out of yet another boneheaded attempt to fulfill the mission's objectives despite a galaxy's worth of evidence that there wasn't a single planet out there who either wanted their help or needed it. He was tired and lonelier than he'd ever been in space, and he couldn't help the smile that made his cheeks ache when Lance picked up the phone with a muffled, "McBride's house of haggis."

"Hey," Keith said. "I'm just about done getting my post-mission ass-reaming from the Brass. I should be home tonight."

"Cool. I'll make fish." Lance hung up and Keith put on his hat and when he got back to Lance's house he smelled wood smoke and there was a note resting on his bathroom sink telling him to come around back when he finished showering.

He grabbed a couple of beers on his way out; the feeling of sand between his toes was wonderfully soothing and completely prevented him from sneaking up on Lance who was sitting in front of a fire pit and staring at the ocean.

"Pull up a patch," Lance told him as he took his beer. "The fish is almost done."

Keith nodded, and sat down and all the exhaustion that he'd not felt suddenly slammed into him. He groaned, a little, and Lance laughed at him for it.

Keith kicked sand at him.

"They don't build bodies like they used to," he grumbled, a little.

"They don't do a lot of things like they used to."

Lance pulled the fish from out of the banked coals and it was just like Arus had been, in the middle part, when they had been fresh and new and used to sneak out into the countryside where they could be loud and shameless. Keith even burned his fingers like he used to and when he looked up, following the smoke and smell of the fish rising like an offering, the stars were the same even if they weren't.

It was so comfortable to sit here, so familiar, and that was mostly the reason why, when Lance reached across him to grab something, Keith took his hand and kissed him slow and gentle, the way he used to but didn't anymore. Lance tasted like beer and salt and ocean, and he'd settled into Keith's lap like he did when they were younger and didn't have bad knees. He made a noise deep in his throat, grabbed on hard to Keith's shirt like he wanted to rip it off or keep it on or just anchor himself in something. Keith could feel Lance's cock through the thin material of his shorts, felt it twitch as he licked the side of Lance's neck where Lance's skin tasted like summer.

And then Lance let go and stood up on legs that were obviously shaky and nearly stepped into the fire.

"No," he said. "I'm not doing this Keith."

"Why?"

"I'm just." Lance ran his hands through his hair, made it stand up in spikes. "I'm not, okay?"

He walked back into his house and Keith followed, tracking sand all over Lance's floor.

"You don't. You want it just as bad as me." Keith was very proud of how level his voice was, at how he didn't say anything else or rant or scream.

"That doesn't matter."

He wasn't quite so proud when he grabbed Lance, slammed him up against a wall, breathing heavily. "Yes it does."

He rubbed up against Lance, who made that same aching noise and still managed to shake his head. "Stop, Keith. We ended this a long time ago." He made the noise again, then pushed Keith away, hard, and his breath was just as ragged, just as full of want. "This isn't why I brought you home."

"Then why? Why?" Keith wanted to punch something, but didn't. Wanted to scream, but didn't. Wanted to cry, but he'd started reserving his tears for very special occasions, now, like death and torture. He just vibrated, instead, and focused all of his attention on Lance. "Why am I here, Lance?"

"Because they declared you dead a year ago and when I heard you were back, I had to see you. I had to." Lance's breath hitched and now he was the one moving, he was the one touching, running his fingers along Keith's face, standing so close that Keith couldn't tell if the heat he felt was the one radiating off of Lance's body or coming from him. "I had to see for myself. I had to know. And, you were and. I couldn't not be with you. I couldn't. I needed you around because it was just. It was fucking weird to be out of contact with you for so long."

"Well, I'm here. I'm alive." Keith closed his eyes, opened them again, and Lance was still there, still close. "I still love you. I always will."

"I know. But." Lance took a step away, wrapped his arms around himself. "There were reasons. Good ones. Very good ones."

"Things change, Lance. Maybe those reasons aren't there anymore." And Keith hated himself for pleading.

Lance just shook his head, took another step back until he was out of Keith's reach entirely, spinning away from Keith as suddenly as if he was on his surfboard and launching up into space in the only way he could now, reaching for the mirrored sky as hard as he could before falling back to the water.

Keith let him go.

Things changed.

Things stayed the same.


End file.
